


Yamato Nadeshiko

by Petronia



Series: Hannibal stories [5]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Chiyoh is done with everything and everyone, Firenze | Florence, Gen, International Revenue Share Fraud, Original Character(s), Season/Series 03 Spoilers, behind every decadent noble is a competent ninja
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-30 18:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5174798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petronia/pseuds/Petronia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He wouldn’t want to be buried here,” said Will Graham, managing to sound as if he cared what Grutas might have wanted. “He didn’t understand freedom when faced with it; he crawled on the ground and no longer had the strength to transcend his circumstances.” He picked up a snail and looked at it, turning it between his fingers. “As those responsible for his life and death, we owe him the honour of metamorphosis.”</p><p><i>Is he incapable of not being creepy,</i> thought Chiyoh, <i>or is he merely not making an effort?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Yamato Nadeshiko

1.

The ground in the wine cellar was too damp to make a grave.

“He wouldn’t want to be buried here,” said Will Graham, managing to sound as if he cared what Grutas might have wanted. “He didn’t understand freedom when faced with it; he crawled on the ground and no longer had the strength to transcend his circumstances.” He picked up a snail and looked at it, turning it between his fingers. “As those responsible for his life and death, we owe him the honour of metamorphosis.”

 _Is he incapable of not being creepy,_ thought Chiyoh, _or is he merely not making an effort?_

“Do as you like,” she said. “No one will come down here.”

“Do you have glue?” said Graham, peering up at her. “And, ah, feathers? You must have feathers.”

He did have big blue eyes, which she supposed was something.

She left him to it, returned to the cottage, and packed a light suitcase as well as her shotgun. Then she made phone calls. The first was to Stefano, in Paris.

“Your passport, funds, and train tickets will be ready in Vilnius,” he assured her. She thought she detected a tinge of approval: Stefano was too professional to pass judgment on the foibles of his employers, but she assumed he thought her terribly isolated. “I will book a sleeper car. You’d prefer to manage the Radviliškis leg yourself, I’m afraid my services would only delay you… What name will your companion travel under?”

“Will Graham,” she said.

“Mmm,” said Stefano.

“One of -- Hannibal’s -- friends,” she said. “Hannibal is in Florence, isn’t he?”

“Mmm,” said Stefano, with even more studious neutrality.

Chiyoh had access to the same accounts Stefano did, and could follow the money trail. There was no point in squeezing him; it would only cause embarrassment.

The second call was to Vincas, down in the village, though it was Jonas who picked up. “I will be leaving the manor today,” she said, “and will be gone for some time. I am delegating the phone service operation to your brother and you. He already has all the banking details. If there is a storm and the lines are cut, he has standing permission to enter the grounds to repair them. As always, you may not enter the manor or the cottage. Understood?”

“Ma’am,” said Jonas, trying and failing not to sound alarmed. “Is there trouble, Ma’am?”

“None that you should concern yourself with,” she said. “I need to have a meeting with Doctor Lecter.”

2.

It was Vincas -- and the brothers’ dearly departed father -- who had pitched Chiyoh on the premium-rate phone service. They’d approached her cap in hand while she was in town, picking up her regular mail (sencha and Yakusen bath salts, in order to maintain a modicum of civilization): as the residing representative of the Lecter family, would she be so kind as to hear out their business proposition?

No one from the village spoke to Chiyoh unless they had to. The going assumption was that she was a witch; besides which, she had found, there was an instinctive avoidance when the Lecter name was mentioned. Memories were long, the Counts had ruled the immediate countryside in a centuries-long line interrupted only by the Nazis and the Soviets, and some previous holders of the title had taken more liberties with the peasantry than Robert or even Hannibal ever would. Mischa’s death had only exacerbated rumours. Chiyoh had no doubt stories circulated about the prisoner in the castle, some of them even likely.

(It occurred to her that she could no longer be certain of the truth herself. But first things first: action was required, in order to discover answers.)

Vincas was the brains, and had explained the technology. It seemed Lithuania was characterized in the global telecom industry by high international call termination rates, due to preexisting carrier interconnect agreements, particularly when the destination number was in a rural area. This made it profitable to run premium-rate phone services in and around the village, provided the physical equipment was maintained. An international call could rack up charges of tens of thousands of American dollars within hours, which would then be billed to the local carrier, who would bill the originating carrier, and so on down the chain.

“I see,” Chiyoh had said. “And these lengthy, expensive, international long distance calls to a 900 number in rural Lithuania, they would be legitimate, I imagine?”

“Er,” Vincas had said, looking at his father, then looked back at her. “Er… yes. Yes, Ma’am, of course. We would provide voice services for those who have accessibility issues with web sites. Horoscopes, stock market hotlines, erot--ahh--dating services, and so on.”

“Mostly dating services,” had said the father, around an unlit cigar stub.

“But we are small potatoes, I admit, my father and I,” had said Vincas. “It is not an easy industry to break into. We have the entrepreneurial spirit and the tech know-how, but we need a backer. Not so much financially, but, er. _Reputationally._ Such that we are legitimized in the eyes of our competitors and partners. The Lecter name goes a long way in this part of the country.”

“You mean the local Brotherhood also believe the Counts are warlocks and cannibals who will put the Evil Eye on them if crossed,” Chiyoh had said.

“Er…”

The father had pulled the cigar stub out of his mouth. “We propose to split the profits fifty-fifty,” he’d said.

“Done,” Chiyoh had said. “You are not to enter the manor grounds except for technical maintenance. And no dating services.”

The Yamato Nadeshiko premium-rate phone service eventually provided hockey and basketball scores, local weather forecasts for travellers, and a select tasteful programming of traditional shamisen music and dramatic readings of _Pan Tadeusz_ in multiple languages. In the first year it netted a cool two million US dollars, both halves of which Chiyoh laundered through Stefano and reinvested in the Lecters’ real estate and stock holdings. Vincas set up their own number aggregator, and the second year doubled their profit.

At the start of the third year, Hannibal had shuffled said holdings around and purchased another house -- a vacation bungalow on an isolated stretch of Massachusetts coastline. Chiyoh had thought nothing of it. After all, she lived in _his_ castle.

3.

Will Graham _dreamt_ about Hannibal. He talked obsessively about killing Hannibal, then said his name and made soft hurt noises as he slept. It was intolerable.

Chiyoh escaped to the open air.

Their deluxe sleeper was the last car in the train. The Polish countryside fell away endlessly on every side: pastures and hay fields and flickering bars of dark conifers and beyond them rolling hills, glazed with moonlight. The mundane modern details -- telephone poles, signage, cars -- had receded into shadow, leaving behind a landscape out of painting. A half-glimpsed window view in a Sacra Conversazione, perhaps, or De Chirico’s redoubled dreams…

She had had a similar, less well-formed thought, long ago, when she had made the inverse voyage: travelling into the dream. Hannibal at her side, then, and it had been spring; all the hills barely veiled with pale green, like the pretty chiffon scarf he had bought her in Paris, and pricked over with orange-red poppies as bright as fire. They had stood together on the observation deck, and Hannibal had told her about… Floralia, yes, the Roman feast of flowers, and the myth of Zephyr and Chloris. The warm reassuring weight of his hand on her shoulder.

He had left her behind, in the place where his nightmares lived, and that year she had faced the winter alone.

Hannibal was the dark hero of the fairytale; Chiyoh had only been a companion. She had known it even then. But it had not occurred to her until Will Graham’s intrusion that she had been _motionless._ As if asleep; as if still dreaming. And now as they sped back toward the Alps, a slow waking to possibilities, and practical thinking.

What had Hannibal wanted?

Had he only been curious, as Will Graham claimed? Had his test of her been an elaborate game, after the conclusion of which the pieces lay forgotten and abandoned?

If so, Hannibal should die. Not for making a mockery of Chiyoh, but for making one of Mischa.

The Hannibal Lecter Chiyoh had known could have cut Will Graham without a qualm, just as he would have cut Grutas open -- and cooked and eaten him, too, piece by piece. That had been when she saw him, for the first and only time. Chiyoh had… cried out, something or other, _Hannibal, no, you mustn’t,_ and it had reached him: he had turned to her with his eyes fathomlessly dark, a soulless thing that could neither be damned nor saved, and said, _What would you have me do?_

Then he had given her the knife.

The question, she assumed, had been for Mischa. So each day thereafter she had made her choice in Mischa’s place, as a human girl might. Living for the dead, neither of them a monster.

Could Hannibal have loved Mischa, and still killed her as he did the others?

Perhaps he loved Will Graham too.

What a thought _that_ was.

****

***

****

Will Graham was soft and mussed with sleep, and very slow on the uptake. He had decent breath for the time of night and was not unpleasant to kiss. The fleeting moment of contact left Chiyoh with the impression that he would have allowed her anything she wanted -- let alone what he might have permitted Hannibal, for whom he was so sick with longing it hung about him like a miasma. Yet Hannibal had sliced him open; and no doubt if Graham got to Florence first he’d put a knife in Hannibal in return, before Chiyoh could look the latter in the eye and ask any of her pressing questions.

“There are means of influence other than violence,” she told Graham a second time, to make sure it registered. Chiyoh was a woman of principle. When she looked back on these weeks, she wanted the satisfaction of knowing she did the right thing, no more and no less.

It was not her fault if men chose to be idiots.

Chiyoh had waited until the train approached a village, slowing in anticipation of a road crossing. The point wasn’t to break Will Graham’s neck, even though that would vastly simplify the situation. The irony alone would be too much.

****

4.

****  
** ** ****

Someone had been murdered spectacularly in Florence, such that the Questura were out in force, and all the news reports were buzzing. Hannibal could not be found at his known address.

His self-proclaimed psychiatrist could.

The less said of _that_ the better.

5.

The Polish villagers proved far too hospitable: Will Graham turned up in Florence a mere half-day behind, battered and bruised and puzzlingly well-dressed. He arrived at “Doctor Fell”’s apartment in tandem with the American investigator Chiyoh had seen at the murder scene, and left alone some minutes later, walking purposefully -- with a limp. Chiyoh tailed him at a leisurely pace.

She felt less certain of the odds when Graham reemerged from the Galleria with Hannibal at his side, _both_ of them limping and clutching pocket knives. Evidently they intended to have it out then and there, in the slowest-moving and most bathetic duel the _cortile_ would have witnessed since the reign of the Medici.

The task was to avert an embarrassing public display with the least expenditure of blood and bullets. Chiyoh took aim, considered very carefully, and shot.

 

***

 

The American -- clearly an FBI agent -- was a burly, middle-aged man who meant the epitome of business. Presumably he’d been sent by the Bureau to Florence, in order to rescue Will Graham and arrest Hannibal Lecter; unless it was to arrest Will Graham and shoot Hannibal Lecter. But Chiyoh couldn’t take him in the confines of an elevator: she needed range.

By the time she had set up with a clear line of sight to the safehouse’s dining room windows, though, Hannibal had neutralized the FBI agent, and was strapping him to a chair at the foot of the table. Graham, in a new shirt and seemingly barely conscious, was already placed at the head.

Guests of honour at dinner.

Fine silver, glassware, china, an antique soup tureen on the sideboard. A brazier -- a copper pan -- a hand-held bone saw.

Chiyoh thinned her lips and kept her finger on the trigger. Hannibal had to know she was watching: there had been no surprise, no anger, when she’d put the bullet in Graham. He assumed she wouldn’t shoot _him,_ it was as simple as that. And why should he think otherwise?

Chiyoh had always tried to protect him.

If she didn’t shoot him, Graham and the FBI man would die. Not quickly; over the course of hours, perhaps.

Hannibal’s profile, caught in the fine crosshairs. He looked grim, and pale. Those dark eyes.

_Hannibal, no, you mustn’t._

_What would you have me do?_

Then five unmarked vans pulled up at the entrance of the building, and things happened very quickly.


End file.
